The Christmas Angel (4 page)

‘That’s what I thought, but I didn’t quite like to be rude. You know – he might’ve been a visitor that the sisters were expecting. After all, we do get some odd people turning up.’

Clem shrugs. ‘Well, he clearly knew the history of the place. Perhaps he was just a nosy visitor staying down in the village.’

Janna finishes her tea, glances at the clock. ‘I’d better dash. Vespers will be over in ten minutes and Sister Ruth’ll be needing help with supper. I’ve left your change on the table. Thanks for the tea.’

‘Thanks for the shopping,’ Clem answers.

He pockets the pile of loose change, scrumples the till receipt and puts it in the bin. Part of him wishes that he’d asked Janna to come back later and have supper with him, but he knows that once he’s finished Jakey’s bath-and-bed routine he’ll be quite happy simply to slump in front of the television with a sandwich. It’s hard physical labour, keeping the grounds and the house maintained, as well as making certain that Jakey’s needs are answered. Dossie and Janna are a terrific help, but the aching emptiness remains: he misses Madeleine, and he misses the peace he once knew: the deep-down peace of recognizing his vocation and committing to it.

He stands beside the table, hands in his pockets, head bent. The shock of Madeleine’s death threw him off track. He utterly lost his bearings. A few things were clear: she’d want his first care to be for their child and he couldn’t possibly have managed that at Oxford. Her parents lived and worked in France and so were unable to be of any great help to him, and although Dossie offered, even begged him to allow her
to
move to Oxford to make a home for them, he couldn’t have been responsible for the fact that the move would be such an upheaval for her. After all, she went through all this before: the loss of her beloved young husband in a car smash and the prospect of bringing up their child without him. Back then, she was in the last year at catering college and she used all her new-learned skills to start up a business immediately so as to earn a living whilst looking after her baby. How could he possibly have asked her to give up her clients, her contacts and all her other commitments? Impossible. Clem shakes his head. The other alternative, of Dossie taking Jakey back to Cornwall while he continued his studies in Oxford for the next three years, was also out of the question. Jakey had lost his mother; he needed his father. Back in London Clem could earn good money to pay for a full-time nanny and he’d have the network of his friends to support him. The prospect was a bleak one in contrast to all that he’d looked forward to but, anyway, how could he trust that his sense of vocation was a true one? Why should this tragedy have happened within the first few months of his training if he had indeed been called to the priesthood? For a long while he railed against God: angry, despairing, in pain.

In retrospect, he sees that all his decisions were driven by guilt and grief – and yet, three years later, he found his way to Chi-Meur. And now there is a sense of healing and a measure of peace to be found working in this magical place so close to the sea, or slipping into the chapel for the Eucharist at midday, or to listen to Terce or Vespers or Compline. And talking to Father Pascal in his tiny cottage down in the village.

Slowly, reluctantly at first, Clem talked to the old priest
about
his confusion and his anger: how he believed that finding the job at Chi-Meur and the kindness of the Sisters, as well as Janna’s friendship, were healing him. But to what purpose? What of the future?

‘Signposts?’ Father Pascal suggested on one of these occasions. ‘The generosity of strangers, the love of friends. Don’t you think that these might be signposts on the road to God? The promises of God, who is on the road ahead of you. He will meet you there.’

‘Where?’ Clem asked wearily. ‘I thought I’d already got started on that road and then it blew up in front of me.’

‘But you found Chi-Meur. You are on the road again, perhaps even a little further on. But the initiative is with God.’

Now, Clem takes his hands out of his pockets and glances at his watch: nearly bath-time; and Jakey has been watching television for much longer than his usual allowance and won’t want to stop. Clem breathes deeply and braces himself for battle.

In his bedroom in a farmhouse further along the coast, Janna’s stranger crouches over his mobile.

‘It’s all in pretty good shape,’ he’s saying. ‘Lovely house. Young feller in the lodge house looking after the grounds. He’s got his work cut out. And a girl in a caravan. Chief cook and bottle-washer, I should say. Bit of a looker … No, no. Don’t get out of your pram. There’s nothing like that going on. But I’m picking up information in the village. Four nuns. Sisters, they call them. Elderly. One of them a bit ga-ga. Can’t see how they can hope to carry on myself, though they’re very popular with the locals … No, I’m not staying in the village. I’m at a bed and breakfast up the coast a bit. It’s a farm. Nice and quiet. Pretty basic, touch of the Worzels, but
it
suits. I’ve told them I’m writing a book about the north Cornish coast and its history. They’re thrilled about it …

‘So we put in our offer and wait? And, if they accept, then it can be proved that the house is no longer going to be run as a convent and you can appear waving your bit of paper and say that, under the terms of the old will drawn up hundreds of years ago, you, as the last descendant of these particular Bosankos, are entitled to inherit … Yeah, I know that’s a bit garbled but that’s where we are. Right? … No, nobody can hear me. Don’t be so twitchy. I told you, the dit is I’m researching a book. It might be televised. I’ve dropped a few well-known names and the locals can’t wait to be in it. Everyone wants to have a say. I’ve got Phil Brewster lined up, ready to go when you say the word … OK, I’ll have another look around. Same time tomorrow? OK.’

He switches off and stares around the tidy, comfortable room and then out into the wet, dark night. There is no sound, no streetlights. He shivers, makes a face, wonders how people can stand living in all this quiet. He drags the curtains across and stands for a minute, thinking. Seems a crazy scheme, this one, but Tommy’s got them through a few deals, right on the edge, bit dodgy, but lucrative. He’s a bright boy, is Tommy; old school tie with a lot of upmarket contacts, but he keeps you on your toes, chin on shoulder. He was excited at that last meeting, really buzzing with it.

‘Now listen,’ he said. ‘A friend of mine down in Truro, a lawyer, has turned up something rather interesting on the old family estate. I want you to go down and have a look around. It’s been a convent for nearly two hundred years but if we can get proof that it is no longer viable then, according to this document, it reverts to any surviving descendant of this particular branch of the family. We’ve checked it out and
that
’s me. Seems there’s only a couple of the nuns left and they might be thinking of joining other larger communities. Now we don’t want to alert them, d’you see? We’re working on the fact that nobody’s been looking at the small print. Just get down there and check it out.’

‘I don’t get it. If it’s yours by right anyway—’

‘Look, old chap,’ Tommy let him see he was being patient with him, ‘you discover that the old dears are thinking of moving on. You give the OK to Phil Brewster. He does his hotelier act and puts in a very nice offer, which they’ll imagine tucking into the coffers of their religious society to secure their futures. “Oh, yes,” they say. “Thank you very much.” He gets some positive proof of their intention to accept the offer, passes it on to you and then – wham, I turn up with a copy of the old will. Deal falls through, the place is mine. I know someone who would pay very, very serious money for a place just there.’

‘But what do they get out of it?’

Tommy laughed then; really laughed. ‘You just don’t get it, do you?’ he said. ‘They don’t get anything. I get the ancestral home back and sell it to the highest bidder and they have their treasure in Heaven where moth and rust don’t get a look in. Now, you get the proof and I move in. Usual pay and expenses.’

Caine raises his head. The wind is rising and the rain slaps against the window. He’s been offered supper and he’s accepted gratefully. He’ll spin a story about the book, talk about a television series and mention a few names: Simon Schama, Dan Cruikshank. What’s the name of that bird who does
Wainwright Walks
?

He hears a noise. The farmer’s wife is on the stairs and he goes out quickly to meet her, shutting his door behind
him
so that the sharp black eyes can see nothing in his room.

Nosy cow, he thinks, but he smiles at her, turning on the charm.

‘Is that supper ready, Mrs Trembath? Goodness, I’m hungry after being out all day.’

‘’Tis all waiting, Mr Caine,’ she says, and he follows her down the stairs.

Dossie puts down the telephone and makes a few notes on her laptop. She’s working in the kitchen this morning, it being a much warmer room than her tiny, north-facing study upstairs; but at least, these days, she has a study all to herself. Things have changed since she came back home all those years ago as a very young widow, to have her baby and try to make a career. It was her parents who, in between running their own rather off-the-wall bed-and-breakfast business, looked after Clem whilst she organized lunches and dinners, cooking up special-occasion feasts in other people’s kitchens.

‘Of
course
we can manage, darling,’ her mother said. ‘And we know lots of people who will simply leap at the chance of having you catering for their parties.’

She was right. Her parents had a great many connections all over the peninsula who were very willing to help out the widowed daughter of their friends. Gradually she built up a very solid client base and, with Pa and Mo as resident baby-sitters, she travelled the length of the county from Launceston to Penzance, and from Falmouth to St Ives. Sometimes, now, Dossie wonders whether it was fair to allow herself and Clem to be a burden to two middle-aged people who were trying to earn their own living. Yet,
somehow
she didn’t think about it quite like that. Pa and Mo were so all-embracing; so capable and so laid-back. Their guests, mainly friends of friends and parents of friends, who all seemed to become dear old chums after the first visit, would arrive with dogs – or even with a grandchild – in tow and the elegant grey stone house – The Court – was always full of people. She’d come in from doing a lunch in Truro to find two old fellows having a quick pre-dinner drink with Pa in the drawing-room before they set out for the pub, their wives chatting to Mo in the kitchen whilst they ordered breakfast. A dog or two might be stretched out in the hall or in the little television parlour where someone would be catching the news.

Clem loved it. They brought him little presents when he was small, agonized with him through GCSEs and A levels, cheered him on to university, whilst Pa and Mo gave him exactly the kind of loving neglect that worked so well for his independent character. And now she is able to make some kind of return for all that love and generosity. The roles are reversed, and she can support them as once they supported her and Clem. It took Pa’s stroke, collapsing all among the debris of the full English breakfast, to persuade them both that perhaps they should give up their ‘B and B-ers’, as they called them, but she still has a few of the specials to stay. Pa and Mo still behave like the good old-fashioned hosts that they were, and everyone has a lot of fun.

Dossie makes some notes on the big calendar on the fridge so that Pa and Mo will know where she’ll be and what is happening workwise. When it comes to a social life not much is going on at the moment. There have been relationships, of course, one or two more serious than others, but some
of
the men involved were rather cautious about taking on a young boy, as well as the possibility of Pa and Mo at a future date.

‘You’re crazy,’ her younger brother, Adam, would say. ‘Get a life. You’re still young and they’ll manage perfectly well on their own. They’re indestructible. I don’t know how you bear it. I couldn’t get out quick enough.’

Just recently, since he’s moved in with Natasha and her two teenage daughters, Adam’s words have changed. ‘They should have downsized ages ago when the market was still strong. You shouldn’t have encouraged them to stay on. What are you going to do when The Court has to be sold and they go into a home?’

Dossie always feels a little chill of fear at these words. She can’t quite imagine herself anywhere else but in this pretty, gracious Georgian house, with its elegant sash windows and perfect proportions, which has been in the family for generations. Even worse, she can’t picture Pa and Mo in sheltered accommodation amongst strangers. After all, they are still quite fit even if Pa tires very quickly since his stroke and Mo struggles with arthritis and is rather deaf. And, oh, how they’d miss the dogs if they were to be separated from them.

‘Are they crazy?’ Adam demands, when Pa and Mo adopt a Norfolk terrier as a companion to their old black Labrador. ‘How old is it? They’re far too tottery to be having puppies around.’

‘Wolfie is six,’ Dossie answers. ‘He’s not a puppy. His owner died very suddenly. He was one of Pa’s old mining friends. Wolfie’s an utter sweetie and no trouble at all, and John the Baptist loves having him around. He lets Wolfie share his basket and he’s got a new lease of life.’

‘And if they have to go into a home? Pa and Mo, I mean. Are you going to be able to afford a place where you can have two dogs and keep working? Especially an elderly lab with a predilection to submerge himself in any kind of water at every opportunity. Try to think ahead, for God’s sake!’

‘Is it permissible to dislike one’s brother?’ she asked Clem furiously, later that afternoon at the Lodge. ‘He is just so bloody selfish! He’s so afraid that I might think that I can stay on at The Court when Pa and Mo have to leave it.’

She didn’t want to use the word ‘die’ but she saw that Clem understood her. His half-smiling, half-frowning expression was a familiar one: compassion mixed with an instinctive need to keep a balance, which was oddly comforting. If he’d raged with her she’d have contrarily felt obliged to be reasonable. Clem’s calm but sympathetic response always gives her full scope for her fury when she feels like it: he is on her side.